Shaker Betsy was recently looking through her copy of Sisterhood is Powerful, a collection originally published in 1970, and re-read Florynce Kennedy's essay, "Institutionalized Oppression vs. the Female," in which, as Betsy says, "She's trying to make the point that institutionalized oppression doesn't require active oppression by individual men (or whites); the system ensures that women and other groups stay subjugated," where she found this passage:

Just by nobody doing nothing the old bullshit mountain just grows and grows. Chocolate-covered, of course. We must take our little teaspoons and get to work. We can't wait for shovels."

That was written before I was even born. I've never read Kennedy's essay—but you can bet I'm going to now.

Here's a little bit about Kennedy from her obituary, with just an awesome picture of her (which I found separately).

Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and political activist whose flamboyant attire and sometimes outrageous comments drew attention to her fierce struggle for civil rights and feminism, died on Thursday in her Manhattan apartment. She was 84.

…People magazine in 1974 called her "the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and radical politics join in mostly common cause."

…In her autobiography [Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times (1976)], she wrote: "I'm just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stopped to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me."

Right on.

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Teaspoons

Shaker Betsy was recently looking through her copy of Sisterhood is Powerful, a collection originally published in 1970, and re-read Florynce Kennedy's essay, "Institutionalized Oppression vs. the Female," in which, as Betsy says, "She's trying to make the point that institutionalized oppression doesn't require active oppression by individual men (or whites); the system ensures that women and other groups stay subjugated," where she found this passage:

Just by nobody doing nothing the old bullshit mountain just grows and grows. Chocolate-covered, of course. We must take our little teaspoons and get to work. We can't wait for shovels."

That was written before I was even born. I've never read Kennedy's essay—but you can bet I'm going to now.

Here's a little bit about Kennedy from her obituary, with just an awesome picture of her (which I found separately).

Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and political activist whose flamboyant attire and sometimes outrageous comments drew attention to her fierce struggle for civil rights and feminism, died on Thursday in her Manhattan apartment. She was 84.

…People magazine in 1974 called her "the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and radical politics join in mostly common cause."

…In her autobiography [Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times (1976)], she wrote: "I'm just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stopped to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me."

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